She revived from having died to talk about the light and the love

The emotion that Nancy Rynes remembers most when she woke up on that January day in 2014 was anger.

It wasn’t anger at the texting driver that had hit her while she bicycled the Lafayette roundabout. It wasn’t anger about the injuries she suffered as she was dragged some 50 feet under the young woman’s car or the work that surgeons were doing to save her life.

Rynes was angry because she had been sent back from paradise and irrevocably among the living after being legally dead for some two minutes.

“I didn’t know what to do with all this,” Rynes said. “I felt like I was crazy. What had just happened? I didn’t have any words, and I didn’t say anything to anybody. I didn’t want to get committed to a psych ward. I didn’t know this happened to people.”

Rynes is one of the near-death experience survivors and researchers who attended Westminster’s Westin Hotel for the International Association of Near Death Studies annual conference in Colorado this past August 3-6, drawing people from around the world.